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BHS expands drug testing to include administrators and supervisors
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Neighbors | Tim Cleveland.Stadium Drive Elementary School Principal Jim Goske (left) signed his paperwork after completing his drug test at Boardman High School.
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Neighbors | Tim Cleveland.Boardman Schools Director of Operations Tim Saxton (right) prepared to take his drug test at Boardman High School.
By TIM CLEVELAND
The Boardman Board of Education implemented a new drug-testing police for Boardman High School students who play sports and drive vehicles on the school campus for the current school year.
Boardman Schools Superintendent Frank Lazzeri decided to put his money where his mouth was, feeling it wasn’t fair to ask the students to take a test and not have school administrators and supervisors take the same test.
“I feel that we as school leaders, whether it be a teacher, a principal, a guidance counselor, we can’t be held to a different standard as the students,” he said. “We have to be willing to show being drug tested. I think being a positive role model is very important.”
Lazzeri said the test was first expanded to include all new Boardman Schools hires.
“I had a conversation with the board,” he said. “I said I’d like to expand this to all of our new hires. The board passed the new policy last spring and over the summer I probably hired 25 teachers and another 20 or so non-teaching employees. One of the conditions of employment was they would test clean before being offered a contract.
“So, I took it a step further and said, we as administration, as Board of Education members, we’re the leaders of the school system. We shouldn’t be saying, students and new employees, you be tested. We have to set the example. We got that through the board, so this school year, I told the principals and supervisors, I want every one of them tested by Dec. 1. Today’s the first testing day this fall.”
From Oct. 1 - Dec. 1, school administrators and supervisors were to report to take the same drug test as the students.
Lazzeri said the new testing police came about due to the failure of the prior, voluntary, test.
“This all started back three years ago when we first started talking about drug testing within the Boardman Schools,” he said. “We felt that we needed to be proactive in terms of helping students make better decisions. At that time, we passed a board policy about voluntary drug testing. The policy was a failure – no one volunteered.
“We revisited that this past school year. We had a committee put together of parents, administrators, police, teachers. We said let’s make this mandatory in whatever way we can. We checked the law and it is legal to have students drug tested if they wish to participate in something that isn’t their right, such as driving a vehicle on school grounds and participating in extracurricular activities. That takes care of about 60-70 percent of our students at Boardman High School.”
The test would be done on a hair sample as opposed to urine or blood. Among the drugs that will be tested for include marijuana, hashish, opiates, amphetamines and cocaine.
“We chose hair because hair is the best indicator that gives us a retrospective look at a person’s activities for the past 90 days,” Lazzeri said. “Urine can be masked, saliva is not as accurate, I’m not sure about blood testing if you want to go down that lane. We did our homework and we decided that hair sampling is the best way to go. Major organizations such as the FBI, New York City police, they do hair sampling.”
The tests cost $45 per test. Lazzeri said he has budgeted $35,000 for all the tests for this school year, with only $10,000 - $15,000 having been used on approximately half of the students eligible to be tested.
Students, administrators and supervisors will be tested only once, even if the student plays more than one sport. However, once tested they then will be put into a random pool so they possibly will be tested again.